The 11th Annual Festival of Art will welcome internationally known artist Alan Magee as its featured guest speaker on Saturday, May 18, at 1:00 p.m., at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center. Alan Magee attended art school in Philadelphia and in 1969 began working as an editorial and book illustrator in New York. Magee's clients included Time Magazine, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Simon & Schuster, and Bantam Books. During the 1970s Magee produced paintings for the covers of books by Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, John Irving, Henry Miller, Edward Abbey, Agatha Christie, and Patrick White, to name just a few. His illustrations received numerous awards, and in the late 1970s Magee began to concentrate on his personal paintings. In 1980 he presented his first solo exhibition at Staempfli Gallery in New York. Since that time, he has had annual one-person shows throughout the United States and Europe.  In 1991 a ten-year retrospective  “Alan Magee 1981-1991”, traveled to four US museums. “Archive”, an exhibition of Magee’s black and white monotypes, opened at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall in November, 2000 and later traveled to the Portland Museum of Art, the University of New Hampshire at Durham, and the New England College Art Gallery. An Alan Magee Retrospective exhibition opened at the James A. Michener Art Museum in 2003; the Farnsworth Art Museum, 2004; the Museum of Texas Tech University, 2004; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, in 2005. Magee has received awards for his painting from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design.  Several television documentaries have been made about his work, and he has been interviewed on various radio shows across the country. Magee’s works can be seen in many museums and corporate and private collections including: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Portrait Gallery, the US Capitol, the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, Lucasfilm Inc., the Bank of Japan, the Union Trust Bank, The Janss Collection, and the collections of Billy Wilder, Henry Fonda, Arnold Newman, Johnny Carson, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, Nicolas Cage, and Morley Safer, among others. Alan Magee is represented by Forum Gallery in New York, George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco, Greenhut Gallery in Portland, Maine, and Dowling Walsh Gallery, in Rockland, Maine. His work may also be seen on the internet at www.alanmagee.com.

The Festival of Art is a non-juried exhibit, scheduled to run May 16th through May 19th at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center, located at 80 Belmont Avenue (Route 3 west) in Belfast. This year 155 Maine artists, professional and amateur, will show their work.  The entire event is free and open to the public.